Energy Consulting Services

In the last decade, with large scale deployment of renewable energy, there has been a big shift and push for a change in the way consumers get their electricity. From the early days of the industry, a model developed whereby electricity was centrally generated in large power plants spread out in a handful of locations generally set away from the population. In the 60s and 70s nuclear energy saw rapid expansion as did our need to consume energy. It’s no surprise that the largest power plants in the world are nuclear power plants. With these large new plants a need arose for major investment in infrastructure to bring the electricity generated at these plants to the end users. With incidents in the 70s, 80s, and 2010s, the focus has shifted away from nuclear in favour of especially wind and solar. A single wind turbine or solar panel cannot replace a nuclear reactor. The amount of land and space needed for large-scale wind and solar also is a magnitude greater than the footprint o...

Historically, hydroelectric power has dominated Central America's electricity sector; however, since opening up to foreign investors in the middle to late 1990s, thermal generation has grown rapidly. Although the diversification of power supply has had a positive impact on these countries, there still are problems, as hydropower remains susceptible to droughts and the price of oil can fluctuate. In a move to increase energy supply security, Central American countries have been integrating their electricity grids. This project, known as the Puebla-Panama Plan, aims to reduce prices and to minimise supply disruptions. With almost no domestic hydrocarbon reserves (oil, natural gas and coal), all seven Central American countries rely heavily on imported energy plus indigenous hydropower to meet their domestic energy demand. In 2002, the countries met only 25% of the region’s total primary energy consumption from domestic energy sources. Of all the countries, Costa Rica was the m...

For obvious geographical reasons, the Northern part of Europe started the process of integration of their national systems later but it became the most significant model was Nordel, combining international exchange in a free international market. In this relatively small region there is a huge diversity of power sources. In the early 1990s Norway was and still is almost 100% reliant on hydro power, while its neighbor Sweden used hydro power for approximately half of its generation, the rest being split between thermal and nuclear power. Finland’s generation was 60% thermal, with the rest split about evenly between hydro and nuclear power, while Denmark relied on thermal power for 90% of its electricity. In the hydro dependent countries, when water levels were low it made sense for Norway and Sweden to be able to draw on cheap thermal power from Denmark and Finland, and when water levels were high it was equally sensible to sell cheap hydro power to Denmark and Finland. And so Norde...